According to Stefan Trethan the connections on the JBC T245 tips are different than previously stated. According to his findings, on this tips the thermocouple is between the outer sleeve and the inner contact, so if the inner contact is connected to the pulsed (PWM) 24v rail the iron tip will have approximately the same voltage (difference will be Read More

Continuing with my goal of adding new toys to my lab/man cave/junkyard I decided I needed a hot air soldering station for smd soldering. I have been using the one I have at work but always wanted one for myself. Although ready made chinese stations can be bought for about 100USD that was about 80USD Read More

Hi, Just a quick update regarding this firmware. It is now compatible with 1.3inch screens, also the iron temperature font size was increased. The new release files are available here Also there is a discussion on eevblog about this firmware, check it out here. Cheers, José

Final Chapter In this post I will present the finished firmware, its features, and two small hardware changes I made. Hardware changes I made two controllers, one for the JBC tips and one for the Hakko T12. The original controller used a sort of sensor on the handler which woke up the station when Read More

Lately I have been using the ST’s STM32CubeMX for pin, peripherals and midlleware configuration and initial project setup, and Ac6’s System Workbench for STM32 for code editing and debugging. They are both free and cross platform.

Starting with the STM32Cube software and working from the schematic from the previous post, we first create a project defining the processor type and continue by defining our inputs and outputs as follows: Read More

I found a controller made for the popular hakko T12 tips , featuring an STM32 (which I have quite an experience with), an Oled display (never used one but since they are cheap I can use the learning experience for the future) and a rotary encoder. Schematic was no available but for less than 20USD I couldn’t go wrong.
Judging by the product picture to the right I was somehow convinced that the original firmware was garbage, the Chinese characters, and the fact that the only understandable writing was “error” may have had something to do with that idea.
With the plan strongly defined on ether I asked my wife’s permission to spend 30EUR and ordered myself one of these controllers, an hakko T12 handle and a couple of tips so I could test without ruining a much more expensive JBC tip. Read More

Urmm so who am I and what is this blog about. Well…I’m a 40ish year old man, married, with 3 children, a wife and no cats or dogs. Born and raised in one of the biggest country in terms of history and smallest in terms of territory, Portugal, western Europe, known by its wine and Read More